What do the John Birch Society, Eagle Forum, Common Cause and Planned Parenthood have in common? They all oppose the states’ use of Article V of our Constitution to impose and enforce constitutional limits on Washington.

Later he writes:

The sad thing is that the conservative opposition groups don’t even seem to realize that in stoking fears about an Article V convention, they are reading right out of the Left’s playbook. While they tell the conservatives on their direct-mail lists that they are working to save the Constitution from being rewritten by George Soros and his ilk, Mr. Soros smiles, breathes a deep sigh of relief, and toasts to their success.

Never mind how these conservatives missed the Memo in which the 230 most liberal, Marxist-leaning organizations in the country explicitly stated their opposition to the Convention of States Project. These fringe conservative groups, fighting hard against the broader conservative movement to oppose this constitutional safety valve, are blocking the one politically feasible means the Right has to reverse our nation’s slide into socialism. So long as the John Birch Society, Eagle Forum, and certain representatives of Concerned Women for America are fighting this fight for him, Mr. Soros can save his billions to send more statists to Congress, where they can continue to exercise powers never actually given to Congress in the Constitution, but blessed by an activist Supreme Court.

The Federal Reserve sanctioned Wells Fargo, saying it cannot grow until it improves its “governance and controls.” Last year Wells Fargo revealed that its employees created more than three million fictitious accounts in customers’ names so they could reach their sales quotas. They also sold auto insurance products their customers didn’t need and charged excessive fees to veterans who were refinancing their mortgages.

Kevin Carroll is the executive director of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, which advocates for 110 hotels. Among hotel managers and owners, “everybody’s talking about it,” he said.

“You see things on the streets that are just not humane,” he said. “People come into hotels saying, ‘What is going on out there?’ They’re just shocked. … People say, ‘I love your city, I love your restaurants, but I’ll never come back.’”

Increasingly, families who are serious about education are leaving the Edina schools. For example, Orlando Flores and his wife pulled their son—an academic superstar—out of Edina High School in his senior year to escape its hyper-political environment.

Flores, who fled a Marxist regime in Nicaragua as a child, had this to say: “Years ago, we fled Communism to escape indoctrination, absolutist thinking and restrictions on our freedom of speech. If we see these traits in our schools in America, we must speak out and oppose it.”

Even the bus drivers are subject to this:

One such mandatory session for school bus drivers is illustrative. The widow of a bus driver who had been required to attend the training sent the entire 25-page instructional curriculum to Center of the American Experiment, where I am a senior policy fellow.

The training session was entitled “Edina School DIstrict Equity and Racial Justice Training: Moving from a Diversity to a Social Justice Lens.” In it, trainers instructed bus drivers that “dismantling white privilege” is “the core of our work as white folks,” and that working for the Edina schools requires “a major paradigm shift in the thinking of white people.” Drivers were exhorted to confess their racial guilt, and embrace the district’s “equity” ideology.

In 2012, Mr. Lee left Hong Kong and returned to the United States to live with his family in Virginia. F.B.I. agents investigating him searched his luggage during a pair of hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia, and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.

In the books, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency.

In many countries, extreme malnutrition “can be caused when there is war, a drought, some sort of catastrophe or an earthquake,” said Dr. Ingrid Soto de Sanabria, the chief of the hospital’s nutrition, growth and development department. “But in our country it is directly related to the shortages and inflation.”

The Venezuelan government has tried to cover up the extent of the crisis by enforcing a near-total blackout of health statistics, and by creating a culture in which doctors are often afraid to register cases and deaths that may be associated with the government’s failures.

But the statistics that have come out are staggering. In the Ministry of Health’s 2015 annual report, the mortality rate for children under 4 weeks old had increased a hundredfold, from 0.02 percent in 2012 to just over 2 percent. Maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold in the same period.

For almost two years, the government did not publish a single epidemiological bulletin tracking statistics like infant mortality. Then in April of this year, a link suddenly appeared on the Health Ministry’s official website, leading to the unpublished bulletins. They showed that 11,446 children under the age of 1 had died in 2016 — a 30 percent increase in one year — as the economic crisis accelerated.

The new findings made national and international headlines before the government declared that the website had been hacked, and the reports were swiftly removed. The health minister was fired and the military was put in charge of monitoring the bulletins. No reports have been released since.

About $7.5 million of the settlement is the estimated scientific value of a planned donation of the company’s adult biological samples, tissues and cells to a nonprofit academic and scientific teaching institution affiliated with a major U.S. medical school, according to the agreement. Prosecutors did not disclose the name of the medical school.

The defendants also will donate and transfer laboratory storage containers and equipment estimated to be worth more than $10,000.

Cities today are about as politically diverse as the former Soviet Union; they are increasingly dominated by “the civic Left,” for which pragmatism and moderation represent weakness and compromise. The emergence of Trump seems to have deepened this instinct, with mayors such as de Blasio and Garcetti, Seattle’s Ed Murray, and Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges all playing leading roles in the progressive “resistance” against the president. Their anti-Trump posturing is mostly for show, but these mayors are pushing substantive — and increasingly radical — agendas of social engineering. Their initiatives include, in Los Angeles, imposing “road diets” on commuters to reduce car usage (while making traffic worse), as well as “green energy” schemes that raise energy prices. Most are committed to serving as “sanctuary” cities and enacting unprecedented hikes in the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate income inequality by diktat.

Many of these efforts clash with the aspirations of middle-class residents, who tend to drive cars, want to preserve their human-scale neighborhoods, and own small businesses highly sensitive to wage levels. Regulatory policies that seek to limit lower-density housing have led to escalating home prices in areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. In these areas, housing costs (adjusted for income) are roughly two to three times higher than in places like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh.

They conclude with:

Rather than indulging feel-good radical experiments in social justice, cities need to rediscover their historical role as creators of the middle class, as Jane Jacobs put it. If they don’t, some extraordinary areas — in brownstone Brooklyn, much of Manhattan, Seattle, west Los Angeles, and San Francisco — will likely become ever more exclusive, divided between the rich and the hip (many of whom are their subsidized children) and surrounding poor populations working in low-end services (or not working). The policy emphasis should shift to middle-income areas — whether in the Sunset district of San Francisco, Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Queens, or South Brooklyn — and closer suburbs, which could keep some younger families in the urban orbit. Such a shift will require a new kind of urban politics, one that encourages grassroots industries and corporate relocations that create more middle-income jobs, promotes the flourishing of human-scale neighborhoods, and accommodates families with good schools and low crime. The appeal of urban living remains viable, though today’s urban political class sometimes seems determined to kill it.

In a court case like this, everyone meticulously employs medical jargon and euphemism. A dismemberment abortion, for example, is called a “dilation and evacuation,” or simply D&E. (The idea is to refer to what’s being done to the woman’s cervix and uterus rather than what’s being done to the fetus.) Speaking of the fetus, the favored term for what happens when it’s killed is “fetal demise.” Expert witnesses and attorneys on both sides in this trial have discussed at length the question of fetal demise. How can fetal demise be accomplished safely and effectively? What complications might arise from causing fetal demise? How often does an injection of digoxin fail to bring about fetal demise? Is fetal demise medically necessary?

The purpose of such language is to hide from ourselves the horrifying reality of we’re talking about. One expert witness for the plaintiffs, Dr. Mark Nichols of Portland, Ore., corrected a state’s attorney’s offhand use of the phrase, “unborn child.” “That’s not the term we use,” he said. “That’s not the medical term.” Sometimes, Nichols said, doctors will cause fetal demise prior to performing a second-trimester abortion to guard against “extra-mural delivery,” which is when a baby that’s supposed to be aborted is instead born alive—an event that can “cause distress” to the patient (the mother, not the unborn child). Later, he spoke of “removing parts of the pregnancy,” by which he meant ripping the limbs off a live human being. No wonder we speak of such things in euphemisms.